Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests on Christmas for the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel. Among the initial pull requests were the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates that for this cycle most notably has the long-awaited FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support.

This was a hearty DRM update for Linux 4.21 with a lot of great material included. As a reminder, new on the DRM table for Linux 4.21 are:

- The AMDGPU FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync bits now that the developers worked out the core DRM properties around variable rate refresh. The Mesa/user-space side FreeSync support should be merged shortly.

- Also on the AMDGPU side is Adaptive Backlight Management (ABM) for Display Core, GPU reset support for Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands / SOC15 hardware, AMDKFD compute support for Vega 12 and Polaris 12, DCC scanout for Vega/GFX9, more xGMI work for Vega 20, GPU reset improvements, DC trace support, PowerPlay updates, and DMA-BUF support for AMDKFD.

Well, Linux (Or I guess the whole free software mindset and Gnu project as a whole) is a DRM of sorts if you think about it. It allows you to restrict what's running on your PC if you desire so, even if it's not actually ceding that control to a 3rd party.

So in a way, it allows you to manage your personal digital rights more effectively, meaning that I guess you could technically call it DRM even if that's clearly not the intended meaning of the phrase. (ie. Corporations trying to protect their income)

Highly depends on a distro, both what you can easily do and what kernels they make available. Not every distro is trying to be on a the cutting edge of testing new stuff and some go with stability instead.

Considering how everything is "open" it takes way too long in Linux world to adopt new hardware features, often due to a change being needed in Kernel and those in charge of approving those changes don't want to change things. Monolithic kernel... they really should change that already.

Highly depends on a distro, both what you can easily do and what kernels they make available. Not every distro is trying to be on a the cutting edge of testing new stuff and some go with stability instead.

Considering how everything is "open" it takes way too long in Linux world to adopt new hardware features, often due to a change being needed in Kernel and those in charge of approving those changes don't want to change things. Monolithic kernel... they really should change that already.

It isn't Linux that is slow to adopt hardware features, but the manufacturers themselves. If the manufacturers would submit the necessary code for their hardware to function properly prior to them releasing their products we wouldn't have this problem. Instead, for many things, the burden lies on kernel devs to reverse engineer windows drivers.

BTW, this new freesync support is only for the opensource driver, Freesync has worked with AMD's proprietary driver for a couple years now.

Register Now

In order to be able to post messages on the Overclock.net - An Overclocking Community forums, you must first register.
Please enter your desired user name, your email address and other required details in the form below.

User Name:

If you do not want to register, fill this field only and the name will be used as user name for your post.

Password

Please enter a password for your user account. Note that passwords are case-sensitive.